Presidential election campaigns tend to follow a predictable
issues timetable, but certain events can upset that timetable in a big way. The
death of US Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia is precisely such an event,
and its consequences will be felt in November.

By the time Scalia's body reached the funeral home, US
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had already handed Democrats a
great talking point and turnout motivator with his announcement that he intends
to put off Senate confirmation of any replacement for Scalia for a full year,
until a new president has been elected and sworn in.

The usual tactical approach when a president of one party
nominates a candidate for approval by a Senate of the other party is basically
brute obstructionism -- dragging out the committee investigations, perhaps
pushing back with the discovery or manufacture of scandals, and so on.
McConnell could have almost certainly pulled that off. There would have been
grumbling, but heck, there's always grumbling.

Alternatively, a "consensus" appointee acceptable
to both sides of the aisle might be allowed to run the gauntlet. In this case,
the likely pick would be DC Court of Appeals judge Srikanth Srinivasan, who
clerked for "conservative" justice Sandra Day O'Connor, worked in the
Solicitor General's office during the Bush administration, and was confirmed by
a 97-0 Senate vote when Obama appointed him to his current post.

Instead, McConnell laid out an entirely new doctrine: When
the Senate doesn't like the sitting president, he says, it will just hold off
on confirming Supreme Court appointments until it gets a president it DOES
like.

Why is that such a big deal? Because the implications
stretch far beyond the replacement of Scalia.

At least three more SCOTUS justices -- Ruth Bader Ginsburg,
Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer -- are, as was Scalia, in their late 70s or
early 80s. Along with Scalia, they cover the whole range from
"liberal" to "conservative." And like Scalia, there's every
reason to believe that they will each retire or die during the next
presidential term.

"Rob Kall has certainly acquired the firsthand experiences and knowledge gained through interviews to deliver some interesting insights about the "bottom-up" information revolution. Whereas the old 'top-down' systems created stove-pipes and excessive secrecy that blocked information sharing and led to the 'failure to connect the dots' before 9-11, the bottom-up approach should be the main fix. Kall's concept would seem to interface equally well with the founding fathers' idealism in setting forth their democratic theory of governance as with the realism that makes the multi-sourced, bottom-up Wikipedia work. As someone who shares my support of both government and corporate whistleblowing -- which is nothing more than encouraging greater horizontal sharing of information, I commend Rob Kall's important work on this topic."

Coleen Rowley, former FBI special agent and named one of TIME Magazine's "Persons of the Year" in 2002)